Pages

Saturday, June 20, 2015

Stonehenge Virtual Reality tour! It’s Super Awesome!

When you put ‘solstice’ and ‘archaeology’ together in
the same sentence, most people immediately think of that jewel of the Salisbury
plain: Stonehenge. Throughout its long and varied career and multiple
incarnations, the site has probably never been a quiet place at the solstice. Today,
with competing claims for access from a variety of groups, including archaeologists,
neo-pagans, neo-druids, and their assorted neophytes, you would be hard pressed to
get within touching distance of the stones. With some 20,000 people
expected this year, your chances of even seeing the solstice sunrise are
limited, don’t mind finding any form of personal enlightenment or inner peace …
or whatever you might journey there to seek. For the rest of the year, the
stones are distinctly off limits to almost everyone. Unless you’re Gandalf or a
high-ranking archaeologist with a superb research design your chances of
getting close to those famous stones is vanishingly remote. End of story.

The wonderful Howard Goldbaum (Associate Professor,
Reynolds School of Journalism University of Nevada, Reno) is the creative and
technical genius behind the Voices
from the Dawn and All Around Nevada
projects. Through these two initiatives he has become justifiably renowned for his
innovative use of Virtual Reality environments that allow personalised
exploration of and interaction with various heritage sites. A little while back
he reformatted his VR
tour of Newgrange into a Head Mounted
Display (HMD) for Google
Cardboard. I went and bought a HMD set to hold my smartphone and went on my own VR visit to exploration of the Newgrange passage tomb. I was vastly impressed
with it [here].
It’s easy to say that you can’t really trump the experience of seeing the site
in person and, that’s generally true … but the VR tour has a number of distinct
advantages that being there lacks. Not the least of these is the fact that you
can take your time and are not being hustled along by a tour guide with a
schedule to keep. So long as you have a web connection, you can also get a taste for
the site from anywhere in the world - a very important consideration for anyone with mobility issues or who simply can't afford to travel.

Howard has now turned his attention to doing the
same for Stonehenge … and he very kindly asked if I'd like to preview it. Full of anticipation and excitement, I donned suitable headgear and headed out into my back garden to explore. I thought I knew what to expect ... it's Stonehenge after all, but all I can tell you is that the results are just stunning. My comments on the
Newgrange VR experience centred on the word ‘Awesome’
… but I’ve struggled to find the correct superlative for his Stonehenge work.
Perhaps only ‘Super Awesome’ will really cover it. I’ve spent parts of the last
week exploring the site in unprecedented detail, spending all the time I cared
to looking at the bluestones or gazing up in wonder at the magnificent
trilithons … the hairs on the backs of my arms standing to attention, practically
enraptured at the feeling of being truly present within the stones and being
wholly moved by the experience … and all from the comfort of my house and
garden.

You can find the regular VR Tour here,
and the reconfigured HMD version here.

If you have your head-mounted display, load the HMD Stonehenge tour here. Then touch the “Enter VR” button. To navigate, turn your head to align the crosshairs target with the arrow. The full Stonehenge page is here. (source)

On this solstice I would advise leaving Stonehenge
to the revellers and the nervous-looking English Heritage officials. Instead, take
a solitary and genuinely moving, personalised tour though this remarkable site …
it is well worth the time and the price of the headset. Tomorrow, when all the
visitors have gone home and the site is once again closed to the general public, you can pick up the headset and explore all over again … what’s not to like?